How to enable the condtions for progress in development-constrained countries?

Status: Open, 13 May 2026

Problem statement:
If I led a development-constrained country and wanted to enable the conditions under which my people could create knowledge—criticism being cheap, error being correctable, dissent being survivable, discovery being rewarded—what would I do, and what would I commit to never doing? And how do those conditions take root where they are currently weak?

Dwarkesh posted this question: What should countries which are not currently in the AI production chain (semis, energy, frontier models, robotics) do in order to not get totally sidestepped by transformative AI? If you’re the leader of India or Nigeria, what do you do right now?

But I think this is focusing on the incorrect unit.

Dwarkesh's question takes the AI production chain as the relevant unit—who makes the chips, trains the frontier models, builds the robots. The relevant unit is a population's capacity to create knowledge, and that "being in the chain" is downstream of that. If I'm right, a country that solves the deeper problem can be fine without owning fabs or frontier labs, and a country nominally in the chain whose people can't critically use the outputs is worse off than it looks. That's a sharper claim than it first appears, and it would survive or fail on specific predictions—e.g., over the next twenty years, do AI productivity gains accrue more to populations with stronger knowledge-creating institutions than to populations that happen to host more compute?

Other reasons for why I am broadening the scope:

727 million people do not have electricity

The number of people without access to electricity worldwide has dropped by more than half between 2000 and 2025, amounting to 727 million in the latter year. The biggest decline was recorded in the developing Asian region, where the population without access to electricity declined by over 90 percent in the period. Meanwhile, this value increased in Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounted for 80 percent of the global total in 2025.

Published by Won So, Mar 16, 2026

2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water

Between 2015 and 2024, 961 million people gained access to safely managed drinking water services, raising global coverage from 68% to 74%. However, 2.1 billion people still lacked safely managed drinking water, 1.5 billion had basic services, 287 million had limited services, 302 million relied on unimproved sources, and 106 million collected water directly from surface water sources such as rivers and lakes.

UNICEF